ACLU sues Murray schools over student expelled for poem

Posted on March 31, 2006

I keep getting emails about this one. I’ve been meaning to post about it.

ROME, GA (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Murray County schools for expelling an eighth-grader for writing a poem on school violence.

The student, whose name was not released, was suspended and expelled last year after he showed a notebook full of poems to his English teacher, according to an ACLU statement.

The statement said several students and another teacher “read the poem without incident, all commenting on his creativity and none believing the poem to be threatening.”

The student was indefinitely suspended from the school and later was barred from attending any school in the district for the rest of the school year. Officials also filed an action against him in juvenile court that claimed he made criminal “terroristic threats,” the ACLU said.

“Kids are being raised in a society where there are violent images around them, not just in movies but in the news,” said ACLU attorney Beth Littrell. “Their writing may reflect that and the school should not be punishing them for their creative expression unless it’s truly threatening.”

Murray County School District has not yet received the lawsuit, said Dean Donehoo, director of administrative services. Donehoo declined to comment until the lawsuit has been reviewed by the school district’s attorneys.

A reader emails the poem in question to me.

This is the poem:
Something bad is going to happen at school,

Maybe not to you, maybe to Loni,

I’m not very sure, but I know it’ll haunt me

For the rest of my life and for the rest of my days,

all I will see is a red bloody haze.

From Death to Desire,

I have to find a heart that I truely addmire.

From blondes to brunets, reds and browns,

their screams provide me with a crisp, clean sound.

I live in horror, terror and fear

I feel like I must do something like Paul Reveare.

I hear guns go off, bodies drop

I just wish this little game would stop.

Your heart beats, Your goin in shock,

you reach for the glock but tha music stops …

Another reader emails:

Please take a look at these attachments.My daughter is Loni,the girl mentioned in the poem.
What are her rights?It seems like the boy who wrote the poem is the only one who has rights.They never mentioned his name but my daughter’s is there in black & white.By the way,she is still a minor
Thanks,
Cindy (last name removed for privacy concerns)

That certainly sounds threatening to me. Imagine if the school did NOT act on this poem, and the student in question did manage to harm Loni. The lawsuits against the school, very possibly aided by the ACLU, would fly fast and furious.

Allegations of the schools failure to protect the student from “a reasonably foreseen event” would crawl through the legal system, while the school defended its’ position of not taking action for fear of trampling on the First Amendment Rights of the student that wrote the poem, in the meantime Loni, and anyone else that may have gotten in the way of this student during his “exercise of his First Amendment Rights” would be, at the least, damaged for life.

This is a no win situation for the school, and erring on the side of caution, and in favor of protecting a student, was the correct course of action.

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2 Responses to “ACLU sues Murray schools over student expelled for poem”

kerwin_brown on April 1st, 2006 6:57 am

I understand where the school is coming from but the ACLU just seems to be stirring up trouble. I wonder how many dead can be attributed to their efforts?
Jenée on April 1st, 2006 8:19 pm

I happen to be one who doesn’t think the student’s suspension was justified, at least not based on the information provided here. I didn’t interpret the poem as being threatening in the slightest. It sounds to me to be an expression of the sort of fear that I’m sure a lot of students these days have to deal with. The only possible danger I could see being read into this is that perhaps (and it’s a big “perhaps”) he knows/suspects someone else might carry out deadly actions, thus the comparison of himself to Paul Revere who warned others of impending danger.

If this student has exhibited any sort of behavior to indicate he could be a threat to himself or anybody else, then maybe the suspension was warranted. But if he’s just an average teenager who was suspended simply for writing a poem on a dark subject matter then I hope the ACLU’s lawsuit on his behalf is successful.